Cary Carson, The End of History Museums, Plan B

Managing Museums

The End of History Museums:What’s Plan B?

Cary Carson

AAbbssttrraacctt:: Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobilesand floppy disks? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound,but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of ThePublic Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is sim-ply passé. Instead he offers a “Plan B” that takes account of the new way that learners to-day organize information to make history meaningful.

KKeeyy wwoorrddss:: History museums, historic house museums, museum visitation, future of publichistory education, learning styles, new media

R.I.P. Drive-in movies, traveling circuses, LIFE Magazine, the Scarsdale Diet,contract bridge, zero-base budgets, Lionel train sets, Rock ’n’ Roll. Every-thing we do for fun or self-improvement goes through a life cycle. Once born,it builds, it booms, and eventually and inevitably it busts. Often so do the in-stitutions that provide these experiences. Now gone—or going-going-gone—are regional orchestras, serious bookstores, network news, fraternal lodges,labor unions, the record industry, and country-club Episcopalians.

History museums, and historic house museums in particular, look to beentering the same nosedive to oblivion.

Or are they? It depends on whom you ask. Speakers at the symposiumwhere these remarks were first presented reported both good news and bad.My assignment was to weigh them in the balance. To do that again here in the

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The Public Historian, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 9–27 (November 2008). ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.

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pages of The Public Historian, I encourage readers to start by casting an eyeover the whole landscape that history museums occupy today. Then let’s drilldown and try to fathom what may really be going on under the surface, largelyout of sight. Finally, I know that I won’t be forgiven if I don’t take a stab atthe question, What’s Plan B. So that too, in conclusion.

Is the condition of ailing history museums terminal or not? News of deador dying institutions appears regularly in the public press.1 Last year ColonialWilliamsburg created a small sensation when it announced its intention to sellnearby Carter’s Grove Plantation to any private or corporate buyer willing toaccept the stringent preservation easements attached to the property.2 Tooexpensive to operate was the reason given; unspoken was the additional awk-ward fact that the plantation no longer served as an added attraction for vis-itors to Williamsburg. Instead it had begun competing head-to-head with therestored town for a dwindling number of ticket-buying customers.

Meanwhile, up the road in Richmond, the Museum of the Confederacy,once the “Shrine of the South,” declared that it too had reached a “tippingpoint” that threatened its very existence.3 Plummeting attendance (from91,000 in the early 1990s to 50,000 today) left it so strapped for cash that thedirector proposed selling the original downtown property and moving Jef-ferson Davis’s Confederate White House to Lexington, Virginia. SturbridgeVillage in New England has made a different but no less drastic choice. Theregion’s largest assembled collection of historic house museums slashed thestaff of costumed interpreters from seventy-two years ago to only twenty to-day.4 Headlines like these alert the public that some of the country’s mostvenerable institutions are in deep trouble.

There are exceptions, success stories that buck the downward trend invisitation. The waiting lists for daily tours through the Lower East Side Ten-ement Museum in New York City grow longer every year, for instance.5 TerryDavis, president of the American Association for State and Local History,insists that size matters in understanding attendance figures. “The ‘desti-nation sites’ have the biggest problem,” she says. She means the dinosaurdestinations—the Mount Vernons, the Williamsburgs, the Sturbridge Vil-

10 ! THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

1. Bruce Courson, “Why Rural Museums Are Becoming Ancient History,” Wall Street Jour-nal, December 27, 2005; David A. Fahrenthold, “Living-History Museums Struggle to Draw Vis-itors,” Washington Post, December 25, 2005.

2. Tracie Rozhon, “Homes Sell, And History Goes Private,” New York Times, December 31,2006; Marian Godfrey and Barbara Silberman, “Carter’s Grove Reassessment is a Model for His-toric House Museums,” Virginian Pilot, January 29, 2008; Edward A. Chappell, “Carter’s Grove:Next Chapter,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal 30, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 68–73.

3. Neely Tucker, “Swept Away By History,” Washington Post, April 4, 2007. The saga con-tinued in Neely Tucker, “Plan Would Divide Confederate Museum’s Relics,” Washington Post,September 6, 2007.

4. Jenna Russell, “A Historic Replica Retrenches, Sturbridge Village Cuts Staff, Facilities toMake Ends Meet,” Boston Globe, November 21, 2005.

5. The Sandwich Glass Museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts, appears to be another successstory. See Courson, “Why Rural Museums Are Becoming Ancient History.”

lages. “Small grassroots organizations,” she points out, “haven’t suffered verymuch at all.”6

Tell that to Michael Wilson, who runs Great Camp Sagamore, the Van-derbilt hideaway in the Adirondack Mountains. His numbers have always beenmodest: 12,000 walk-ins annually during the peak years before 2001, but sincethen, they have dropped to 7,000.7 Listen to the scuttlebutt at professionalmeetings, and you have to conclude that many “grassroots” house museumsaren’t faring any better than the Vanderbilts.

The truth of the matter is that nobody knows for sure what’s really goingon. No national organization keeps statistics on museum attendance—notthe American Association of Museums, not AASLH, not the Institute of Mu-seum and Library Services. Nor is there an industry-wide formula for count-ing admissions. Worse yet, visitors to any one museum are frequently notcounted the same way from one year to the next. So, without reliable, com-parable numbers, the perception goes unchallenged that paid attendance athistory museums has plunged in the last five years. That perception is fed bythe few numbers that do leak out: Colonial Williamsburg down 18% in thefour years since 2000, Monticello 15%, Mount Vernon 28%.8 Other troublingsigns point in the same direction. No house museum or historic site, what-ever its size or fortunes, can take encouragement from a recent survey con-ducted by Research Advisors, a marketing research firm serving the museumcommunity. They found that history museums rank dead last with familyaudiences who visited the eight different kinds of museums they surveyed.9Does this perception of declining attendance, plus the reality of rising costs,add up to a full-blown crisis? Or is it, as Terry Davis prefers to see it, “just abusiness change we have to get used to”? The real answer seems to be any-body’s guess. On the other hand, nobody believes that history museums arebetter off today than they were in, say, the good old days of Enola Gay andDisney’s America.10

In any case, anxious administrators and nervous trustees are not waiting forsolid numbers before seeking solutions. The remedies they have been exper-imenting with depend, of course, on their diagnosis of the problem. What couldexplain the seeming downturn in attendance all across the country? Here again,

HISTORY MUSEUMS: WHAT’S PLAN B? ! 11

6. Terry Davis to Cary Carson, personal e-mail correspondence, August 2, 2007.7. Conversation with Michael Wilson, August 26, 2007.8. Attendance figures for 2000–2003 reported by Daniel Jordan, executive director of Mon-

ticello, at a symposium, “Why Is Historic Visitation Down?” National Trust for Historic Preser-vation annual meeting, Louisville, Kentucky, September 30, 2004. A consortium calling itself TheOutdoor History Museum Forum does not make public the attendance statistics it collects formember institutions, a practice that reinforces the impression that they do not contain good news.Paid admissions figures published in Colonial Williamsburg’s annual reports hint at an evensharper decline since 2000, closer to 21.5%.

9. “Museum Audience Trends,” Research Advisors Study of Family Visitation at Museums,Part II, online newsletter from Research Advisors (1497 New Scotland Avenue, Slingerlands,New York 12159), Summer 2007.

10. Davis to Carson, August 2, 2007.

speculation is rife in the absence of national or even regional market surveysfocused specifically on the audiences that do or do not visit history museumsand historic sites. “Competition” is usually fingered as the number-one cul-prit, the competitors being everything from theme parks and water slides toshopping malls and video games. Overpopulation among history museumsthemselves means more competition. It is estimated that fully half the muse-ums in the country have opened since 1960.11 Close behind competition is ahost of other presumed causes—high gas prices, 9/11 jitters, changing vaca-tion habits, working mothers, the chilling effect of Standards of Learning onschool visits, and—always and forever—the conviction among history teach-ers that the ascendancy of social studies has created an entire generation ofhistorical dummies. Probably all can be blamed to one degree or another.

Guesswork then is currently the best available strategy both to measurethe extent of the alleged problem and to understand its suspected causes.Guesswork also directs the search for solutions. The most desperate responsesaim simply at staunching the flow of red ink, reducing expenditures in theface of fixed expenses, rising costs, and falling gate receipts. Sturbridge Vil-lage shutters its four-year-old Oliver Wright Tavern and cancels Thanksgiv-ing Dinner for a thousand registered guests.12 The Mariners’ Museum in New-port News, Virginia, collapses its education staff from a department of sevento a barebones office of two. Smaller museums, among them many house mu-seums, reduce hours, freeze salaries, defer maintenance, and leave vacanciesunfilled. Terry Davis is probably right about these short-term economies;they’re the painful but not unfamiliar downside to an ever-recurring businesscycle.

A few museum professionals regard the situation more gravely. They areguessing that the history museum field is experiencing what Barbara Silber-man terms “a seismic shift,” a bedrock upheaval of geologic proportions.13

What future that shift foretells set the agenda for a super-exclusive summitmeeting held five years ago at Kykuit, the Rockefeller family Hudson Valleyestate, now turned into a conference center. Twenty-eight senior museum pro-fessionals met in 2002 (and reconvened a year ago last April) to take a big-picture view of the situation—to trouble-shoot problems industry-wide, ex-plore far-reaching solutions, and, generally speaking, rethink historic housemuseums for the new century.14

The self-evaluation part of the three-day exercise produced few surprises.


11. Cited in Harold Skramstad, “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Cen-tury,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 117.

12. Russell, “Historic Replica Retrenches.”13. From remarks delivered at a public lecture sponsored by the organization she heads, the

Heritage Philadelphia Program, February 1, 2006.14. “Rethinking the Historic House Museum of the 21st Century,” Kykuit Conference Cen-

ter, April 2002, and April 2007. Proceedings of the recent meeting are reported by Jay D. Vogtin “The Kykuit Summit: The Sustainability of Historic Sties,” History News 62, no. 4 (Autumn2007): 17–20. Nancy Campbell generously shared with me a typescript copy of the “Findings andRecommendations from the Kykuit Conference,” April 2007.

Conferees acknowledged that there are too many house museums for thegood of all, and by and large they are too much alike. As one participant putit, “Too damn many spinning wheels and too few examples of 20th-centurylife styles.”15 Sameness aside, they worried that many house museums’ periodrooms, guided tours, and interpretive programs are—not to mince words—“boring.” As someone explained, many, maybe most house museum offeringsare “tired and antiquated—disconnected both from current issues and fromtheir own communities.” That verdict will come as bad news to the NationalEndowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Serv-ices, and other foundations and agencies that have encouraged institutions,large and small, to make the lessons of history relevant to today and heartfeltto their constituents. Instead, the Kykuit conferees concluded that federal,state, and private funding, however welcome, has added to museums’ head -aches by fostering too much new programming. Those extra responsibilitiessometimes stretch fragile institutions beyond the breaking point.

Make a mental note of two findings in particular from the Kykuit meetings—the part about dull and dreary museum programs and the role that NEH andother grant-making agencies play in program planning. I will circle back toboth a little later.

First though, while I am still trying to put my finger on the troubles wefind so vexing, it must be acknowledged that some progress has been made.Smart people are beginning to figure out what works and what does not. Afew promising new strategies did emerge from the Kykuit meetings. The Na-tional Trust for Historic Preservation has taken some of the conference rec-ommendations to heart. The Trust, as you know, owns and operates a stringof landmark house museums, twenty-eight in all. The Trust, and notably itsstewardship vice president, James Vaughan, have been willing to take con-siderable risks to ensure their preservation. The Trust experimented with pri-vatization well before Colonial Williamsburg put Carter’s Grove up for sale.Seven years earlier they quietly helped the Lee-Jackson Foundation “save”Robert E. Lee’s boyhood home in Alexandria by decommissioning it as publicmuseum and selling it, with protective easements, to a wealthy private buyerwho could afford to take care of it properly.16 The Trust encourages mergersand collaborations. It challenges its property managers to make creative useof parklands associated with some of its holdings. Jazz concerts, Shakespearefestivals, storytelling jamborees, and other popular community events not onlyattract new visitors, they raise money that can be spent to care for historicstructures.

Some experiments bomb, predictably. Already innovators have burned theirfingers often enough to have doped out a partial list of no-nos. For example,


15. James P. Vaughan, vice president for stewardship, National Trust for Historic Preserva-tion, “Historic Houses in the 21st Century: Preserving Historic Houses Today,” lecture presentedat Christ Church, Philadelphia, February 1, 2006.

16. “Robert E. Lee’s Childhood Home Is Sold,” New York Times, March 12, 2000.

don’t squander funds on expensive advertising beyond the usual rack cards,Web sites, and travel directories. “Additional marketing offers very little re-turn,” say those who have learned the hard way. “Do it,” and usually “noth-ing happens.”17

Still worse, because the added costs never go away, is the false hope thatnew galleries, blockbuster exhibitions, souped-up period rooms, or major ac-quisitions will somehow bring back the lost audiences of yesteryear. Theydon’t—not after the buzz dies down, certainly not for the long haul. Con-ventional wisdom is unanimous that, “except for opening night, almost uni-versally there’s no longer-term impact from [adding new galleries] except thatyou now have more building to maintain and operate.”18

Major disasters have recently befallen museums that have bet the farm onambitious expansions or new visitor centers in a gamble to reverse their sag-ging fortunes. Didn’t happen for the City Museum of Washington D.C. Thatvenerable institution had long inhabited a splendid Victorian mansion com-plete with its original furnishings. Four years ago the historical society movedto a new home after spending $20 million to spruce up a redundant Carnegielibrary. Fifteen months later it closed its doors forever when attendance barelyreached 36,000, far short of the 100,000 to 450,000 projected.19

Right now, just down the road from Williamsburg, we are biting our nailsas the Mariners’ Museum dog-paddles desperately in a sea of deficits afteropening a wonderful new wing built to display the ironclad gunboat, the Mon-itor. Meanwhile visitation at the museum hovers around 40 percent of the estimated—and budgeted—ticket forecast.20 Bankruptcies grab the headlineswhen major museums go belly-up. But plenty of house museums are gam-blers too. And usually losers, according to Jim Vaughan. He claims that he“can’t think of one successful case where somebody [told me], ‘we restoredour parlor and people just beat down our doors’” to see it.21

To be fair, for all the countermeasures that come up short, there seem tobe some that really can draw crowds and win public support. But take a closerlook. For the most part, successful new ventures tend to be peripheral activ-ities. They are events that take little account of the host museum’s educationalmission. They are things like weddings, bar mitzvahs, antique car rallies, icecream socials, and silent auctions. All good wholesome fun, to be sure, andthey generate income. Nobody can sneeze at that. All the same, they relegatethe centerpiece historic house or site to the background—educationally andoften literally.


17. Vaughan, “Historic Houses in the 21st Century.”18. Vaughan, “Historic Houses in the 21st Century.”19. Blake Gopnik, “Object Lessons; One Museum Soars, One Plods. Both Want Open Minds,

but the Former Knows Eyes Come First,” Washington Post, August 8, 2004; Jacqueline Trescott,“City Museum to Close Its Galleries,” Washington Post, October 9, 2004; Debbi Wilgoren, “ALast Day With Many First Visits,” Washington Post, November 29, 2004.

20. Arthur Barnes to Cary Carson, personal e-mail correspondence, September 12, 2007.21. Vaughan, “Historic Houses in the 21st Century.”

By contrast, museums’ attempts to beef up or jazz up their education pro-grams often lead to those expensive flops. So what’s the answer? “Take whatyou can get” is the pragmatic advice that is sometimes given. After all, preser-vationists argue, saving old houses is the ultimate goal. If it takes jumble salesand bridal showers to do that, why quibble?

Because these sideshows aren’t history, that’s why! Public historians musttake exception to the expedient notion that attendance figures—door counts—are a false indicator of museum healthiness. To quote Jim Vaughan again, theNational Trust, he says, is “trying to shift our measure [of success] to the qual-ity of what we do rather than the quantity of what we do.”22 Quality shouldbe everybody’s goal always, of course. But numbers matter too. A lot! Andnot even primarily for the ticket income they earn. We public historians werenot put on Earth to run dog shows or referee Easter egg races, however muchrevenue they raise for preservation. We must never forget that fundamentallywe are history teachers. If our institutions of lifelong learning are not teach-ing history, or if we are teaching to ever-smaller numbers of learners, thenthose are the problems we need to tackle and solve.

That’s where I want to take my remarks from this point forward. Plan A was everything that history museums used to do to attract, instruct,

and entertain ticket-buying visitors. Plan A extended to outreach programs,pro grams for schools, and, more recently for museums with Web sites, Internetprogramming. The whole Plan A package depended—bottom line—on gatereceipts, on income earned from ticket sales, in a word, on healthy attendancenumbers. Regrettably those numbers, however inexact, are now headed southfor too many museums. Whatever the reasons may be, Plan A no longer worksas it had been working for as long as most of us can remember.

So is there a Plan B? Or, to ask the question more tactically, how can westeer our struggling institutions toward a place where we and our successorscan eventually discover workable, sustainable alternatives to the tried, true,but now pretty much worn-out practices that we rely on to teach museumhistory today?

To get our bearings and set off in the right direction requires that we seethe museum attendance problem in longer perspective and seek a broaderunderstanding of the leisure-time learning environment from which our vis-itors come. When I lift up my head and look around, right away I see threeobservable facts that command my attention. None figures in most of the re-cent news stories about history museums’ current troubles. Let’s look at theseattention-getters one by one.

First is the fact that visitation has been trending downward, not just for thelast five or six years, not just since 9/11, but for more than twenty years. Soout the window go all the explanations that start with terrorism, gas prices,Republican tightwads, and other up-close bogeymen. Attendance figures go-


22. Vaughan, “Historic Houses in the 21st Century.”

ing back to the 1970s are even less reliable than recent counts. But the trendis unmistakable. Williamsburg’s numbers slide from a high of just over a mil-lion paid admissions through most of the 1970s and eighties to an average of954,000 in the nineties to 803,000 in 2002 to 734,000 in 2005.23 Over the sameperiod Mount Vernon’s averages have dropped decade by decade from1,054,000 in the seventies, to 1,011,000 in the eighties, to 992,000 a decadeago, to 935,000 since 2000.24 The National Trust reports dwindling attendanceat its sites by two or three percent annually.25 Nothing drastic from one yearto the next, but cumulatively the little losses add up to big numbers over twentyor thirty years. The overall pattern should command our attention. It shouldalert us to the strong probability that some fundamental bedrock shift has beentilting the cultural landscape in this country for almost a generation, whetherwe have noticed it or not.

Reality check No. 2. History museums share this same leaky boat with manyother cultural institutions. Declining attendance and failing support are nowwidespread problems throughout the arts and humanities community. But notuniversally. There are notable exceptions. Certain kinds of cultural institutionsare doing well. It is worth noting which are which and asking why the differ-ence. Symphony orchestras, for example, are very hard pressed.26 Meanwhileopera companies are thriving and multiplying as never before.27

For that matter—and this brings me to my final bellwether—these are alsothe best of times for a brand-new breed of history museum. How many of youhave visited—or even heard of—the National Museum of the Marine Corpsoutside Quantico, the Spy Museum in Washington, the Abraham Lincoln Mu-seum in Springfield, Illinois, the National World War I Museum in KansasCity, or the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville? These are just a few. As areporter for The New York Times wrote last fall, “Across the country, shinynew history museums are pushing up like poppies on a battlefield, while thewar horses struggle to scrape off their mold.”28 Granted, none of the new-comers is a conventional historic house museum. But their multimillion dol-lar investments in exhibits and programs, their star-power in attracting huge


23. From the Foundation’s annual reports. Paid admissions rose to 745,000 in 2006, but lev-eled off last year (except for a boost from giveaway tickets) despite a popular, year-long, 400thanniversary celebration at nearby Jamestown.

24. I am grateful to Daniel Jordan and Dennis Pogue for sharing with me attendance figuresfor Monticello and Mount Vernon, 1970–2005.

25. Vaughan does pick up on the significance of the long-term trend in “Historic Houses inthe 21st Century.”

26. Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 2005); Stephen Brookes, “The Post-Classical: No Coats, Ties or StuffedShirts,” Washington Post, October 14, 2007.

27. Jonathan Leaf, “America’s Opera Boom,” The American: A Magazine of Ideas 1, no. 5,July/August, 2007. To appreciate how quickly opera’s fortunes have improved, see Bruce Craw-ford, “The Met Looks to the Future,” Opera News, September 1, 1993.

28. Kathryn Shattuck, “History’s Real Stuff (Sorry, Miss Grundy),” New York Times, Sep-tember 9, 2007; John Maynard, “I, Spy: The Secret Agent Experience,” Washington Post, Sep-tember 6, 2007.

crowds, and their impressive box office receipts should be compelling rea-sons for us to find out what accounts for their popularity.

All three phenomena are worth heeding—the decades-long slump in his-tory museum attendance, the mixed signals from other cultural institutions,and the smash-hit success of the new multimedia attractions. Their messagesare not always easy to sort out. The popularity of the razzle-dazzle attractionschallenges the conclusion that pessimists draw from declining attendance, thatyounger museum-goers have lost interest in the past. On the other hand, theopera revival seems to contradict the easy assumption that technology is thesecret to success. One thing, though, comes through loud and clear. Museumhistorians need to entertain the real possibility that rising generations of learn-ers since, say, the 1970s acquire and process information very differently thanprevious generations did, those old folks that our older museums were builtto serve and served well. In these troubled times, many museum profession-als find solace in a widely publicized study that found that Americans trustmuseums as history teachers more than they trust schools or even their grand-parents. That is a misplaced comfort. Trust is not the issue. What is, is theability of museums to make effective connections with the way people todayhave become accustomed to engaging in the learning process. Not how theycope with the museum environments we already give them. But how today’slearners actually prefer to organize information and put it together to makemeaning.

Guest research and visitor surveys take us part way there. I don’t mean thekind of market research that intercepts museum-goers and asks them to ranktheir experience from one to ten, one being “Refund my money!” A few in-stitutions—not as many as should—regularly conduct in-depth studies aimedat finding out what people see and do in the course of a museum visit andwhat they learn and don’t learn along the way. Three recent surveys from Con-ner Prairie, Monticello, and Colonial Williamsburg give new urgency to whatmuseum educators have known for some time.29 Modern visitors are not con-tent to be passive spectators. Patient onlookers they have ceased to be. ConnyGraft is the director of Williamsburg’s guest research unit. The visitors shecanvassed in her most recent survey told her that they wanted more interac-tive and engaging experiences. They wanted experiences that helped them “feellike I am [transported] back in time.” Mind you, the fully populated, eighteenth-century town they pictured in their imaginations would totally outstrip Colo-nial Williamsburg’s personnel budget, large as it is. Given their druthers, theytold Graft they wished the Foundation would “flood the streets with hundredsof costumed people, twenty-four hours a day! And they wanted to hear about


29. “Reframing Authenticity: Discourse Analysis at a Living History Museum [ConnerPrairie],” PowerPoint presentation by Mary Theresa Seig and Jane Metrick, July 27, 2006; “Mon-ticello Strategic Marketing Plan,” report prepared by Southeastern Institute of Research, Sep-tember 12, 2005; “Colonial Williamsburg Guest Satisfaction: Issues and Insights, 2006 Year-endSummary,” report prepared by Southeastern Institute of Research in conjunction with Guest Re-search, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, March 2007.

common people—tavern workers, slaves, struggling merchants, families ofpoor soldiers, and other people to whom they could relate.”30

While these survey data hold few surprises for museum educators, sur-veyors can discover important insights into popular learning habits by read-ing between the lines. Museum visitors today expect to be transported backto another time and place in their imaginations. It is no longer enough merelyto be told about times past. They are fully satisfied only if they live it—feelit—experience it. That is the first way that the TV- and now the Internet-gen-erations learn differently than all their benighted ancestors who were raisedexclusively on books, or, when visiting museums, were lectured to by talking-books. More about the influence of visual media in a minute.

The second clue to modern learning preferences comes in the statementthat visitors to Williamsburg, once they are taken back to the eighteenth-cen-tury town they imagine, want to meet ordinary people to whom they can re-late. In other words, they are not content to be mere spectators even in thesevirtual worlds. Instead, they expect to become personally acquainted with thehistorical figures they meet there, share their joys and sorrows, and in effectjoin in the action of story being told.

As I said, there is little that is terribly new here. Museum historians haveappealed to visitors’ imaginations for years. Costumed actors have become thestock-in-trade of historic site interpretation. The best of these actor-inter-preters are past masters in the art of encouraging laypeople to cast themselvesin roles that put them in the middle of the historical events portrayed. Theglitzy new multimedia attractions have upped the ante significantly by rais-ing the level of audience participation to exciting new heights. They owe muchof their popularity to high-tech imagineering that turns audiences into spy-masters, Marine Corps leathernecks, and Cassius Clay’s sparring partners.

Some virtual experiences are genuinely educational. Getting behind thewheel and actually driving a Model-T Ford at the Henry Ford Museum is alearning experience that any modern cruise-controller will never forget. Othersimulations are nothing more than theme-park special effects—the icy stingof “real” (fake) snow as Washington crosses the Delaware inside Mount Ver-non’s new, $60–million orientation center, for instance.31

Most small museums cannot even dream of employing professional actorsor virtual-reality simulators, however compatible they may be with modernlearning styles. Plan B, if it is going to work for them, has to be affordable; ithas to be do-able with the human and financial resources they can realisti-cally muster.

Happily, it can be. There is another lesson to be learned from visitors’ re-sponses to audience surveys. The desire of modern museum-goers to imag-


30. Conny Graft, “Listen, Evaluate, and Respond! The Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Re-search Story,” AASLH History News 62, no. 2 (Spring 2007).

31. Jacqueline Trescott, “Fleshing Out a Founding Father” and “The New Buildings at MountVernon: America’s First Home Gets an Upgrade,” Washington Post, October 24, 2006.

ine themselves back in the past, and their expectation that their pretendedpersona will share history’s trials and tribulations with the historical figuresthey meet there, all presupposes that there is an underlying, on-going storythat museum educators let them in on. Stories are the sine qua non of popu-lar history, of course. Storytelling is what we public historians do—or shoulddo. I am often surprised and disappointed by museums that stubbornly insistthat visitors stay focused on exhibited objects rather than using those objectsto take visitors back to the three-dimensional places where history stories tookplace.32 Nowadays everyone with something to sell, be they advertisers,politicians, newscasters—whatever, knows that the messages people pay at-tention to are those that come wrapped in a human interest story. (By the way,I think that’s what explains the competitive advantage that opera companieshave over symphony orchestras.) For starters then, Plan B must embrace thereality that storytelling is the powerful medium in which modern learningtakes place. Let’s see where that takes us.

Bigger is better in this regard. The bigger the narrative, the better it canteach a chunk of American history that is genuinely worth taking the troubleto learn. We glimpsed that truth at Colonial Williamsburg three years ago whenwe invented something called the “Revolutionary City.”33 This program is afully scripted, theatrical production that became the centerpiece of the Foun-dation’s educational curriculum beginning in 2006. Billed as “A ColonialWilliamsburg Adventure,” it is an elaborately produced piece of street the-ater presented live in two, two-hour installments on consecutive days.34 DayOne sucks visitors into the maelstrom of events that lead to the Declarationof Independence and quickly unraveled into a perilous war with the British


32. Barbara and Cary Carson, “Things Unspoken: Learning Social History from Artifacts,”in Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives in the New Social History, James B. Gard-ner and George Rollie Adams, eds. (Nashville: American Association for State and Local His-tory, 1983), 181–203.

33. Cary Carson, Rex Ellis, Jim Horn, Kevin Kelly, Richard McCluney, and Bill White toColin Campbell, “Teaching Citizenship at Colonial Williamsburg: What We Offer Today,” mem-orandum, March 18, 2004 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.); CaryCarson to Jim Easton (chairman, ad hoc Historic Area Planning Group), “Williamsburg Needsa Restricted-Access Precinct in the Historic Area,” confidential memorandum, November 16,2004 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.); Rex Ellis to ad hoc His-toric Area Planning Group, “Historic Area Immersion,” confidential memorandum, December17, 2004 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.); James Horn (chairman)for the Education for Citizenship Steering Committee, “Education for Citizenship. From Sub-jects to Citizens: Our Struggle To Be Both Free and Equal,” draft report, April 29, 2005 (Colo-nial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.); Colin G. Campbell, transcribed re-marks to a community leaders’ breakfast, May 10, 2005 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundationarchive, Williamsburg, Va.); Colin G. Campbell, “From Subjects to Citizens: The American Ex-perience,” lecture to the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York, July 10, 2006 (Colo-nial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.); Cary Carson to Robin Reed and BillWeldon, “Revolutionary City = Baghdad Outside the Green Zone,” memorandum, November15, 2005 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williamsburg, Va.).

34. Edward Rothstein, “An Upgrade For Ye Olde History Park,” New York Times, April 6,2007; Margot Crévieaux-Gevertz, “Revolutionary City Comes to Colonial Williamsburg,” His-tory News 61, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 7–12.

superpower; Day Two hammers participants, role playing as “Citizens at War,”with a long string of reverses, shortages, treasons, threatened slave uprisings,and other dire setbacks until quite unexpectedly victory is achieved at York-town. More than thirty professional actors portray the lives of a few history-book celebrities and many more of those ordinary townspeople whom visi-tors say they want to meet and whose pain they say they are eager to feel. Eachday’s events are presented in a series of seven episodes staged at various lo-cations up and down the street. Visitors move from one scene to another.

“Revolutionary City” tells a great story. More to the point of my remarkshere, the presentation strikes a perfect pitch with visitors’ preferred learningstyle. It takes them back in time, and it gives them a historical identity andsomething to do with it.

Plus one more thing, the real dealmaker for today’s modern learner. Itmakes them feel important. It tells a story big enough to convince them thattheir participation in the narrative has involved them in something importantin American history. Listen to a survey respondent answering the question,“What did you like most about the Revolutionary City experience?” “It mademe feel as though I were there,” this person said. “It made me feel as thoughthese circumstances were really happening to me and that my life would beimpacted by these happenings. It felt important, very important.”35

If I tried, I could not script a more apposite lead-in to the problem thathas drawn me forward, carrot-like, since I began. What is different about theway we moderns have learned to learn over the past forty or fifty years? Whatnew learning habits must museum educators understand and build into PlanB if R.I.P. isn’t to be our epitaph too?

People who know about these things argue that television not only revolu-tionized communications, politics, entertainment, and the family dinner table;it also catapulted every couch potato into the epicenter of world events. Forthe first time in human history news coverage was instantaneous, prodigious,and above all visual. The miracle of television in the 1950s started our pro-found transformation from vicarious learners, many times removed fromevents, into virtual eyewitnesses who now arrive at crime scenes, battlefields,and crash sites sometimes ahead of the ambulances. In addition, televisionpioneered the conjuring act that put us, the viewers, at the center of unfold-ing historical events. “You Are There” was the title of young Walter Cronkite’swildly popular TV show where journalists reported history-in-the-makingevents as if they were the evening news. The more we watched television, theeasier it became to see the outside world from our new vantage point at thecenter of everything. “A sort of God’s-eye view,” anthropologist Thomas deZengotita calls it.36 We soon learned that virtual reality was actually better than


35. Southeastern Institute of Research report to Colonial Williamsburg, March 2007.36. Thomas de Zengotita, “Attack of the Superheroes. Why Washington, Einstein, and

Madonna can’t compete with you,” Harper’s Magazine 309, no. 1855 (December 2004): 35–42.See also Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You

really being there. Television coverage not only gave everybody a front rowseat, multiple cameras provided views from every angle. Close-ups, crosscuts,slow motion, and instant replay gave every viewer a player’s view of the action—over and over again.

This new worldview, by placing each one of us at the center of whateverwe ourselves chose to watch, eventually changed the way we gathered andprocessed information. Listen to Zengotita again: Little by little the real andthe represented fused in our minds. It produced “a culture of performance”to which we were irresistibly drawn because the new media flattered us byinviting us backstage and even onto the stage. The alchemy that melds real-ity and the representation of reality gradually seeped into our psyches. It setus up to expect and eventually demand that our teachers make us equal part-ners in our own education.

Camcorders and video cell phones have accelerated what television started.Educators everywhere are challenged to repackage their instruction as a formof performance art in which the instructees can participate using these newpersonal technologies. Hand-held “clickers,” for instance, have invaded col-lege and university classrooms. Students use a device similar to a remote con-trol to answer lecturers’ questions instantly and electronically. Significantly itwas a TV analogy that came to mind when one college freshman was recentlyasked about clickers in the lecture hall. He said, “I feel like I’m in ‘ask the au-dience’ [mode] on [the show] ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’.”37

Or take religious instruction. Churches of all denominations are rampingup their technology to fill the pews and make worship services user-friendly.Worshippers in a church in Storrs, Connecticut, send instantaneous text mes-sages to the pastor who then improvs them into the sermon. We do this, heexplains, “to help people engage in the conversation live during the service.”38

Even television, where it all started, has succumbed to demands for moreintimate interaction with its viewers. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have be-gun airing footage shot by so-called citizen journalists using cell phone cam-eras. “It really empowers us, and empowers them as well,” says one industryspokesman. “We have two-way conversations, so it’s not just about us show-ing the news, but the community being able to share the news with us.” Fur-thermore, it is cheap. Small armies of tech-savvy volunteers provide their serv-ices free of charge. I will come back to that point in my conclusion.39


Live In It (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005); Yochai Benkler, The Wealthof Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven and Lon-don: Yale University Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and NewMedia Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006).

37. Valerie Strauss, “Breathing Life Into the Lecture Hall,” Washington Post, September 24,2007.

38. Virgil Dickson and Catherine Rampell, “High-Tech Churches Stir Fears of Lost Rever-ence,” Washington Post, September 25, 2007.

39. Howard Kurtz, “Got a Camera? You, Too, Can Be A Network Reporter,” WashingtonPost, September 24, 2007; Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, Forthe People (Sebastopol, Calif: O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2004).

Classrooms, churches, newsrooms, sports arenas. Museums cannot be farbehind. But how can we connect with this tech-drenched public and not sellour souls in the process? At Colonial Williamsburg we began talking aboutthat dilemma several years before we launched “Revolutionary City.” It wasoften a piecemeal conversation, the subject usually coming up in connectionwith something else. But once in a while the directors and vice presidents ad-dressed the problem head-on. Take, for instance, a memorandum that circu-lated to senior staff members at a management retreat in 2004. Entitled “Fu-ture Williamsburg,” it was deliberately written to challenge conventionalwisdom and stretch people’s imaginations.40 (Full disclosure: I feel free toquote from this confidential memo here because I am the author, because Ihave already received my honorable discharge from the Foundation, and, mostof all, because what sounded so far-fetched only four years ago seems a lottamer today.) I present the document here as an early draft of Plan B. Keepin mind that this proposition was originally and is still an exercise in pure sky-larking. Pesky feasibility studies can come later. Our first goal is simply to escape the gravitational pull of traditional thinking and soar to new heightsguided only by what we have observed about modern learning styles. Afterall, the future has to be imaginable before we can get around later to judgewhether it might also be workable.The 2004 memo began, as I have here, bylooking back to the future.

No one can say for sure, but I for one would not be surprised if twenty yearsfrom now our successors look back at the turn of the twenty-first century andsee that historic sites and museum villages were following the same path thatprofessional sports went down starting in the 1950s. Once upon a time, base-ball, football, and basketball fans could experience sports events only by buy-ing a ticket and spending a whole afternoon at the ballpark or arena. Thencame television and a mass exodus from stadiums and field houses. But soontelevised sporting events created a national audience of stay-at-home specta-tors that was vastly larger—eventually larger by tens of millions—than thefans who used to fill the stands on game day. By the early ’70s the sports in-dustry had tapped into TV’s huge advertising revenues to make ballplayersmillionaires and to build glamorous new stadiums for those media-createdcelebrities to perform in. Soon the fans—by now a multitude—began stream-ing back to the glitzy new ballparks to grab some of the excitement they sensedfrom the broadcasts and to see up close players whom TV had turned into stars.Today most fans don’t attend every game, but they come with their buddiesand bring their kids often enough to make club owners very rich men andwomen indeed.

Probably no other pastime will rival the success of professional sports any-


40. Cary Carson to Colin Campbell and Administrative Officers, “Future Williamsburg,” con-fidential memorandum, August 25, 2004 (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archive, Williams-burg, Va.).

time soon. But there are runner-ups. Circuses, for instance, were once the onlyplace where ordinary folks could satisfy their curiosity to see exotic animals.They too dwindled to nothing in competition with a never-ending parade ofwild animal shows on TV from the 1950s to today. Again though, televisionquickly built a large new audience of knowledgeable enthusiasts whose inter-est and sophistication have created a renaissance in the zoo world.

Might museums not be following in the footsteps of these and other oncepopular pastimes that technology has transformed into virtual experiences?Isn’t it possible that what we’re witnessing is not a falling off of interest inAmerican history, but a growing preference to engage it initially in off-sitemedia? Conceivably the “Bowling Alone” generation finds virtual visits moreconvenient, fun, interactive, stimulating, and hassle-free than their parents’practice of loading the kids into the family station wagon, checking into mo-tels, waiting in line, and finally dogging a tour guide through a house museum.

If my guess turns out to be even half right, maybe we have entered the firststages of a transformation that, when complete, will bring the ColonialWilliamsburg experience to millions of history learners first and foremost on-line. In that scenario, real-time visits to the restored town will become optional,but much-anticipated special events for people who catch the history bug firstfrom watching us online, on video, or on TV.

But hold on here! What would “watching us online” actually look like? Howcould “virtual Williamsburg” change places with “reality Williamsburg” andstill live up to the Foundation’s obligation to be a responsible museum educator?

Here I invited my fellow vice presidents to consider a string of what-ifs. Thesuppositions went like this:

• Imagine a future time when Colonial Williamsburg mounts online everyday a 30-minute episode in a continuing, year-after-year historical soap operathat is seen daily by hundreds of thousands of devoted fans across the country.

• Imagine that Colonial Williamsburg anchors this show on the streets andgreens and in the homes, shops, and public buildings of Williamsburg in theyears leading up to the War for Independence. The main storyline—the driftinto rebellion and the shock of revolution—and the unforgettable principalcharacters—the Founders—are drawn straight from the history books. Thesupporting cast and the subplots—the intrigues, scandals, betrayals, love tri-angles, and consumptive illnesses—all those are constructed with the samecareful, purposeful, educated guesswork that our research historians and pro-gram planners employ today. The show becomes the principal vehicle forspreading our “Becoming Americans” message to millions of viewers.

My flight of fancy continued . . .

• Imagine that the Foundation re-allocates its multi-million dollar adver-tising budget to hire first-class writers, producers, and a core cast of eight orten professional actors who populate the drama with personalities that view-ers love or hate, but can’t turn off.


• Imagine that the drama is available only in streaming video: it can bewatched online, but not downloaded. Maybe each daily episode comes forfree—a loss leader. But subscribers get access to a full archive of previousepisodes, interviews with their favorite characters, and background materialon the times and events portrayed. There are hot links to our Web site for fanswho just can’t wait a minute longer to plan a visit to real Williamsburg. Teach-ers and students have access to documents, lesson plans, and our digital li-brary. Best of all, being an Internet production, there are peripherals, spin-offs, and advertising revenue to collect.

• Back home in Williamsburg, imagine that the Historic Area offers walk-in visitors a limited “sampler” of interpreted exhibition buildings and tradeshops on a one-day ticket. All other sites are open only to visitors who bookahead. These are the fans who come to see the soap opera in production. They’rethe groupies who clamor to meet and chat with the TV celebrity actor-inter-preters. These small group tours could be customized, packaged, and pricedto become the standard on-site experience for guests who make FutureWilliamsburg their primary destination.

My memorandum did not end there, but that much was enough pie-in-the-sky for my colleagues. Their skepticism was well deserved, although it mustbe said that some features of my fantasy later popped up in our design for the“Revolutionary City” program.

Flawed though it was, this early version of Plan B got one thing right. Itmade the essential connection between a media-driven superstory—an on-line or television experience shared by millions—and a coordinated menu ofspun-off, on-site, museum visits offered to students, families, groups, and in-dividuals as museum programs always have been. I foresee that the first im-portant step into the next brave new world for history museums will only comewhen institutions in a particular region of the country band together and poolthe stories they now tell separately. Regions might be as circumscribed as, say,“greater Boston,” or as spread out as “the plains states.” The consortiums Ihave in mind would support the creation of a sprawling, long-running, his-torical television or Internet drama. In its overarching narrative, every housemuseum and historic site in the region would find contexts and connectionsfrom which to create programs and activities that visitors could enjoy only byvisiting the real place.

Call this Plan B, Part I—the superstory element. Achieving it will requirean ambitious collaboration, not just museums and historic sites with one an-other, but with independent filmmakers, software engineers, regional theatergroups, and public television. A televised or online superstory cannot be aminiseries. It cannot be John Adams in seven episodes or Ken Burns in thir-teen. It needs to be an on-going soap opera. It needs to win a following ofdedicated viewers who tune in week after week after week. Think “The So-pranos”—dense, noisy, collage-like, unfinished—but “The Sopranos” as se-rialized historical fiction. Think Latin American telenovelas and their world-


wide “Ugly Betty” knock-offs. Think the old “Forsyte Saga,” spanning manygenerations. For that matter, think baseball season—every game a newepisode, every week new winners and losers, every season dizzying triumphsand heartbreaking disappointments, and every few years a doping scandal ora game-fixing scam. They all have one thing in common: they are deliciously,irresistibly habit-forming. No one accuses history museums of that!

Now for Plan B, Part II—the real-time, live museum component. This wasnot something I anticipated in my “Future Williamsburg” proposal. Even fourshort years ago I did not understand how visitors could be more than specta-tors. But they can be, and they want to be. Part II involves another partner-ship, this one between individual museums and a rising generation of plugged-in history learners. I don’t mean visitors who know how to use headsets,Acoustiguides, and touch-screen computers. Those just give spectators but-tons to push. They don’t change the relationship between the teacher-mu-seum and the learner-visitor. Instead I am talking about the newest hand-heldtechnologies that put people “into the game,” as they say—kids armed withcell phone cameras and young adults with Blackberries and camcorders. Let’sjunk the standard house museum tour. “Boring!”—remember? Let’s replaceit with programs that museums deliberately design for technology-competentvisitors who come already steeped in the regional superstory. They can usetheir personal, hand-held equipment to record visual information from cura-tors, actors, guides, interpreters, and ultimately from themselves, their ownreactions to what they are seeing and learning. Later they can download sup-plementary background material from the museum’s own Web site as well asWeb sites associated with the serialized superstory, the hook that turned theminto museum-goers in the first place.

There’s more. Collecting images and information is only half the fun. Re-assembling it and sharing it on do-it-yourself Web sites is the real sport forcyber jockeys. YouTube and Facebook are probably too focused on the per-sonal, but sites like Second Life employ Web 2.0 technologies to send self-selected, “infinitely customizable,” whoever-you-want-to-be, virtual travel-ers on journeys to self-selected, wherever-you-want-to-go, virtual, traveldestinations. These sites already include some very real historical places. Else-where on the Web, Eyespot supplies all the computer tools needed to uploadand remix sound, music, and video “content.” The results are interactive nar-ratives that give a thoroughly modern twist to Carl Becker’s famous phrase,“Everyman His Own Historian.”

Whoa! Time out, I hear you cry. Where is all this going? To tell the honesttruth, I don’t know either. To me too it is still far from clear how public his-tory uploaded and downloaded using these new social networking technolo-gies can be made to work for museum historians. Like the record industry,like politicians learning to campaign on the Internet, we will just have to feelour way one click at a time.

But like it or not, something big is barreling down the information high-way. How do I know? Just last fall the National Museum of African American


History and Culture in Washington launched an interactive Web site six yearsbefore this newest Smithsonian museum expects to break ground for the build-ing itself. The Web site uses social-networking software that enables onlinevisitors to contribute their own stories and thus “be part of the curatorialprocess,” says Lonnie Bunch, the founding director.41 That is the data gath-ering part. He also promises to provide “content and connections” that visi-tors can use to build their own community. He does not explain what thatmeans, and for now maybe it’s just a bunch of Bunch. But what is importantis that he’s talking the talk, and that’s the way we always feel our way beyondthe familiar into the next terra incognita.

Whether you think Plan B sounds exciting or scary, almost certainly itsounds expensive. Can a small house museum afford it? No, not Part I. Noteven Williamsburg’s pockets are deep enough to produce the kind of soapopera for national television that I described in my fanciful memorandum.But actually that is good news. The unaffordability of Plan B, Part I—the pro-duction of regional superstories—guarantees the collaboration that will beessential to its success. The cost of creating first-rate, attention-getting, tel-evision or online docudramas can only be borne by the same public, private,and commercial partners that fund them now. They include public television,private foundations, perhaps professional organizations like the American As-sociation for State and Local History, and, most certainly, the National En-dowment for the Humanities. I believe the time has come for the Endow-ment to create a special category of generous grants to fund the creation ofregional superstories across the country. Nothing would do so much to helpso many small museums in one fell swoop.

There is good news about financing Plan B, Part II as well. It is abbrevi-ated B.Y.O.T.—Bring Your Own Technology. Forget the troublesome Acous-tiguides and the unreliable Kodak carousels. Today’s learners pack their owntechnology. Why do you think television news is so smitten with all those “cit-izen journalists” with their digital cameras and video cell phones? Small mu-seums may have to foot the bill for a Web site, but the essential interactivepart of Plan B, Part II walks in the front door with the visitors.

I will close with a final crystal ball prediction. I believe the greatest chal-lenge our institutions face in the future will not be dollars. Big solutions tobig problems have a way of finding the funding they need. The real test willbe museums’ willingness to collaborate in far more ambitious projects thanthey have ever joined together to accomplish before. That plus the oldest andgreatest challenge of all—summoning the creativity to invent entirely newtwenty-first-century ways to make history come alive, this time for Genera-tions X, Y, Z, and beyond.

I began this talk with the words Rest In Peace. Nobody is ready for that, Ihope. But time is ripe for history museums to rally around a Plan B of some-


41. Jacqueline Trescott, “Black History Museum Debuts Online,” Washington Post, Sep-tember 26, 2007.

body’s making. Otherwise, we are at grave risk of earning another tombstoneepitaph—my favorite, from a burying ground in New England—“Rest InPieces.”

Cary Carson has recently retired from his position as vice president of the ResearchDivision, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

This essay was first presented in September 2007 as a lecture addressed to asymposium on “New Audiences for Old Houses,” sponsored by the NicholsHouse Museum, Boston University, and the Boston Athenaeum.


Cary Carson, The End of History Museums, Plan B

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